Eprom programmer power supply upgrade

I have owned a lot of different programmers but the Dataman 48Pro (Beeprog) is by far my favorite as it's fast, reliable and usb!. I'd even argue it's better than the new version as this one allows the use of standard adapters for non dip stuff. The newest one is far more locked down and forces you to buy expensive adapters.

It's great for the arcade hobby as it'll do oddball proms, pls153s etc, the only problem is it will some times come up with a warning about the power supply not being powerful enough and fail to burn some of these chips. That's because Elnec (Dataman) cheaped out and only included a 1amp power supply, a 4amp is what is needed to cover everything.

Why include a 4amp power supply when you can charge the customer another £100 for a 4amp one later. Well I'm not going to be paying that.

Thanks to Purity for sending me a picture of his original power supply from a Labprog+ which is the same as used on the 48pro. I also confirmed it with a meter but the pinout shown is correct.

So I needed a 15v 4amp power supply and a 6 pin mini din plug. A quick ebay search and I bought this old Laptop power supply for £5 and a plug for £2.50.

 

 Soldered them together and I can now burn any prom without issue for the total cost of £7.50. 😀

Space Firebird (Bootleg) Repair - Part 2

I couldn't wait until tomorrow to finish this repair. 😆 Being a Nintendo board the first place to start with a sound issue of this era board is the 8035 MPU . I don't have one... and they're getting quite hard to come by now but I remembered I bought a bunch of 8039s for Donkey Kong repairs. The 8039 has more internal ram than the 8035 but that's not a problem.

The 8039 brought the majority of the sounds back but no shooting sound. Using the audio probe on the op amps I could hear the shooting sound on one of the inputs but nothing on the output. Replacing the LM324 op amp and everything is now working.

Space Firebird (Bootleg) Repair - Part 1

Another Nintendo board for repair and the collection, I got this in a trade a good while back but have only just gotten around to making a jamma adapter and testing it. When doing a google search for a pinout a ukvac thread comes up where someone says that it's the same pinout as Phoenix, that isn't quite the case but more on that later.

When powered on I got an explosion sound and a starfield and not much else. There were a few dots and lines that were meant to be sprites. This turned out to be a bunch of bad 2101A rams on the video board, thankfully they're all socketed and I am able to test each one out of circuit in the Boardmaster. All but two failed, AMD branded.

I've had issues with AMD branded logic in the past too, maybe they should have just stuck to CPUs.😄

New RAMs fitted. This brought the sprites back and showed a new issue. All the bullets were on the very bottom of the screen under the player ship.

I went looking for counters on the video board, there's some very nice quality schematics for this board online which is a nice change from the usual no schematics or unreadable schematics.

Piggybacking didn't work but using a logic probe I could see the outputs on 74161 @ 4G were all shorted to ground, which also explains why piggbacking a good 161 on top didn't work.

 

Unusual brand of TTL on this board that I don't recognise which is usually a bad sigh but they work for now.

That fixed the bullets issue, a very hard game to photograph as it turns out.

 

 I took 40 pictures and that was the best of them.

 

That's all for now, I'll have to return to it at some point to see why I only get explosion sounds and the rest of the time it's completely silent.

Here's the pinout.

 

This is not at all the same as Phoenix pinout, the controls and video are on opposite sides, you also need -5v for Space Firebird as it has its sound data stored on a 2708 eprom.

Nintendo Vs Super Mario Bros pcb repair

I got this Nintendo Vs board in a trade, someone had taken a heatgun to it at some point and done some damage to the board along with taking off a bunch of TTL, '104' capacitors and the eproms.

Once repopulated and fixing a blow out via caused by the heatgun damage I powered it on but the game did not run, just a solid green screen.

It's not shown in the picture but the top part of the board had a standard cpu installed, with Vs Super Mario Bros you need a dummy cpu in this socket for the game to be run.

Thankfully you can get away without having a dummy cpu and just bridge two pins on the cpu socket instead.

 

This got the game running but with some strange issues such as bad graphics, messed up scores, phantom coin inputs and other times it would run fine for 10-15 minutes.

I was worried it was going to be an issue with trace(s) caused by the heatgun damage and I was going to have to check every connection in the area with a multi meter. Before all that I went through and checked all the ram and TTL chips first as I already knew the cpu / ppu were fine from trying them on another board.

The trusty boardmaster 4000 flagged a 74LS157 @ 5J as having a stuck low output on pin 7.

 

 

This was confirmed out of circuit, a new 157 fitted and it is now fully working.

Early Donkey Kong with different colour palette

I picked up a couple of Donkey Kong 4 stack pcbs for repair, these are the type typically found in cocktail cabinets. The repairs weren't all that interesting typical stuff for DK boards (bad sockets, bad 8257 resulting in missing sprites, bad fujitsu TTL).

What I did find interesting is that one of them is a very rare and early TKG1 revision Japanese version that even predates the Radarscope boards that were converted to Donkey Kong.

I suspect there was a small run of boards made to put out on location to see how well the game performed before Nintendo invested too much money into the game. They wouldn't want another Radarscope on their hands where they got stuck with boards and cabinets they couldn't sell.

It has the original version of the game which has the levels in a different order, the ladder cheat and allows you to save long names during high score saving, the colour palette is also a little different. It is also a bit more standardized than later versions as it outputs regular video that isn't inverted and there's an on board amplifier for the audio which is usually on a pcb attached to the monitor.

The proms have hand written numbers, someone could argue that the proms are simply bad or from another game but as another board was found with the exact same 'off' colours (onecircuit on YT has a video) I think that confirms that originally Donkey Kong was released with these colours and Nintendo changed them later before the TKG2 boards were shipped.

It's not too obvious from these pictures but a lot of the colours are lighter shades, especially Donkey Kong who is a much darker brown in all other versions of the game.

 

 

 

I could only find two other examples of this board online but both have this Kyodo sticker on the sound board.

I don't think there's any way to easily replicate the colours in mame as the proms aren't actually read by mame but for the sake of archiving the proms I've uploaded the dumps here.

2 years went fast..

Not much to report, I haven't got many repairs done in the last 2 years. Starting to get back into it now, I might post some repair logs... I see the only comments I got was due to broken links, I have switched to using a google drive so hopefully that's more reliable.

For some reason the large collection of pdf manuals and schematics that were hosted at jammarcade.net are gone and it looks like the majority of them haven't made it to wiki.pldarchive.co.uk either. So for now at least I've stuck what I have on my google drive.

 

The download link is in the top right hand corner, I don't have all of them, not even close. What's there are mostly ones I needed to use myself, there are a couple that I don't believe were ever hosted any where though, and some I cleaned up myself so have a browse. 😇

Sega Mega-Tech pcb repair

I wasn't planning to log this one which is why there aren't any before pictures but there turned out to be quite a lot wrong with it.

First thing I had to do was clean it as it was filthy, powering it on just gave a black screen. On closer inspection all the sockets needed to be replaced as they were badly corroded.

This got the top screen to work but the games weren't listed or running. This is usually down to bad Sony CXD1095Q chips, I ordered a couple from aliexpress and replaced both of them. This fixed the games not loading / displaying issue but it also revealed new problems.

The graphics were missing and just displaying noise and blocks, this was down to the two video drams that again I had to order. I found some nice new old stock M5M4C264AL-12 on ebay which are the same type and speed rating as the originals.

Now the games were playable but I noticed certain sounds were missing, 'Sega' and the ring collecting sound in Sonic were missing along with a lot of other sounds. This was due to a bad YM2612 which thankfully I had some spares on hand and didn't have to wait a third time.

I also noticed the red output on both screens was quite weak, especially on the main screen. This was due to faulty and leaky transistors, replacing them fixed the problem.

That looked to be everything but I found one final fault, about half the dip switches weren't working. Replacing them with new ones fixed the problem and the board is finally 100%.

 

 

Repair complete.